Why does Cloudflare Pages have such a generous Free tier?

> Additionally, there's plenty of "Upgrade to Pro" buttons sprinkled about. It's the freemium model at work.

I don't think they care much about few "Pro" upgrades here and there. The real money, and their focus as a company, is in enterprise contracts. Note that, Matthew Prince, the CEO, had outlined a few reasons why they have such a generous free tier on an Stack Exchange answer[1]. I think the biggest reason is this:

> Bandwidth Chicken & Egg: in order to get the unit economics around bandwidth to offer competitive pricing at acceptable margins you need to have scale, but in order to get scale from paying users you need competitive pricing. Free customers early on helped us solve this chicken & egg problem. Today we continue to see that benefit in regions where our diversity of customers helps convince regional telecoms to peer with us locally, continuing to drive down our unit costs of bandwidth.

Cloudflare had decided long ago that they wanted to work at an incredible scale. I would actually be very interested in understanding how this vision came to be. Hope Matthew writes that book someday.

[1]: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/88685.

It's not really free. One day, you get a call from their sales team saying "you're straining our network". I kid you not. We were on a business plan and still got this. When we met them in person, we were asked to upgrade to a $2000+ per month plan. From a $200/mo plan. That's a 10x increase. I searched their TOS, nowhere it was mentioned about "straining their network". Turns out that's just their scammy tactic to get you to pay. We refused. That really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Today, I refuse to recommend any client or startup to them because of this extremely unethical practice. All around, I'm not sure they deserve so much positive press/attention, especially after screwing some of their own employees (one even got super famous live streaming the firing).

I heard a great theory about this recently.

The hardest part of onboarding a new customer to Cloudflare is the bit where you need to switch over to having them manage DNS for you.

If you're under a DoS attack or similar, waiting for DNS changes to propagate is the last thing you want to have to care about!

Cloudflare's generous free tier is an amazing way of getting that funnel started: anyone who signs up for the free tier has already configured everything that matters, which means when they DO consider becoming a paying customer the friction in doing so is tiny.

The OP doesn't link to Cloudflare's (repeated) explanation about this exact topic.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-commitment-to-free/

The reason it's free and with unlimited bandwidth is that it's not.

Unless you stay very small, you'll eventually get on the radar of the sales team and you'll realize the service is neither unlimited nor free. In fact, you'll likely have to look at a 5 or 6-figure contract to remain on the service.

Oh boy, where to start..

> So why is Cloudflare Pages' bandwidth unlimited?

> Why indeed. Strategically, Cloudflare offering unlimited bandwidth for small static sites like mine fits in with its other benevolent services

Those are not "benevolent". Seeing a substantial amount of name resolutions of the internet is a huge and unique asset that greatly benefits their business.

> like 1.1.1.1 (that domain lol)

It's an IP address, not a domain. And they paid a lot of money for that "lol", so that people have an easy time remembering it. Just like Google with 8.8.8.8. Not to be benevolent, but to minimize the threshold for you to give them your data.

> Second, companies like Cloudflare benefit from a fast, secure internet.

It's the exact opposite. The less secure the internet, the more people buy Cloudflare's services. In a perfectly secure intetnet, nobody would need Cloudflare.

We're incredibly biased since several members of our team worked at Cloudflare, but we spend ~$20 a month on Cloudflare for our startup and it is fantastic.

- Marketing videos on stream

- Pages for multiple nextjs sites

- DNS + Domain Reg

- cloudflared / tunnels for local dev

- zaraz tag manager

- Page rules / redirect rules for vanity redirects we want to do.

The list gets longer every day and the amount of problems we can solve quickly is amazing. The value to money is unmatched

In terms of brand, Cloudflare reminds me of Google during the idealist “don’t be evil” phase. Giving away lots of free and benefiting from massive mindshare. I feel similar about Cloudflare now as Google then: very positive and wouldn’t begrudge them any work contracts.

I feel like Google started on an extraction ratchet and hasn’t stopped. I used to put everything there and now barely anything. The change in brand for me has been massive.

I run a $3m/yr startup on a free tier Cloudflare account. To this day I have no idea why Cloudflare is not charging us for anything. I would have happily paid them for their service

We're building our startup infra on cloudflare over the other major hyperscalers and it turned out to be an amazing decision...

Generous free tiers, pricing scales very competitively after that, and their interface is not nearly as bad as GCP / AWS.

I highly recommend this stack.

For at least the last decade, Cloudflare has made the impression on me to be what Google wanted to be, in terms of "being good".

I can't remember when it was the last time I've heard something bad about Cloudflare. Then again, I don't use any of their services, even if I have an old account with them. I never saw the need to use them, but like what I see about the products they offer.

They seem to be doing much more good to the internet than causing trouble.

Because they own the CDN and most of the bandwidth is from peering, so it essentially costs them nothing. Netlify on the other hand has to pay per GB to AWS.

This seems like little more than a sales pitch. For instance:

> Second, companies like Cloudflare benefit from a fast, secure internet. If the internet is fast and reliable, more people will want to use it.

The author doesn't seem to have anything to say with any more substance than this gem.

because they’re an amazing piece of technology that also happens to be a state sponsored man-in-the-middle platform.

- collect telemetry data they can use in their products

- bandwidth is cheap but the bad actor data they gather directly helps their paid enterprise tools

- people wouldn't pay for it and move to a competitor that offers it free, so its basically a monopoly on a large portion of the sales funnel

- branding message as "we are the good guys we are so generous" as you can see from the comments has worked in their favor

I still cannot believe the pricing on R2, unlimited egress. It's absurd, I love it!

In the 90’s I worked at an ISP.

We had very generous policies for web pages hosted on our servers.

Those web pages generated outgoing traffic that balanced (partly) out incoming traffic and gave us a negotiating position for peering agreements with other ISP’s

>I wondered why there's an abundance of good, free hosting these days.

Only in the context of developers. For non-tech people who only wants another Wordpress or blogger, there aren't that many choices.

This strategy works incredibly well and it's a continuation of their free dns proxy / caching service. It's a no brainer: the quality of the free services is unbeatable.

At the same time, everytime you need to buy something, you'll think "should I add a new cloud service or just buy Cloudflare?"

I don't like their almost monopoly-position but it's so good I use Cloudflare for all my projects and I keep recommending Cloudflare to all my clients.

In that regard, they remind me of a young Google.

I host my site on NearlyFreeSpeech for about 40 cents a month and there’s no bandwidth limit. The FAQ has always said: “Currently we are not tracking (and hence not billing for) extra bandwidth usage. This could change in the future, but currently we have no such plans.” Even though I could host with Cloudflare for $0, I think the tiny savings are not worth imposing the captcha on people.

Because bandwidth (and static serving) is dirt cheap, presumably especially so for someone like Cloudflare. Hetzner used to charge ~$1.20 per TB beyond the generous included allowances.

Most sites will have a hard time getting anywhere close to that and the ones that do will likely at some point want more advanced features than the free packages offer (or get force-upsold, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42713451).

Once people are in the Cloudflare ecosystem, they're much more likely to upgrade and start using additional services, or recommend Cloudflare to their employer.

The real answer:

If CloudFlare serves a lot of traffic (i.e. people on the internet are requesting stuff from CloudFlare's servers), they get better peering agreements (i.e. pay less) from internet network providers.

When "normal" people/companies connect to the internet, they're paying for the connection. Regional ISPs likewise pay Tier 1 network providers (i.e. "global internet backbone") for the connection, and are charged by bandwidth. When "popular" companies connect to the internet, they don't pay - e.g. a lot of ISPs would host Netflix servers for free (that way, they avoid having to pay for Netflix traffic to Tier 1 providers, but can serve it locally instead).

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network

As other commenters have mentioned, it is a bit of a bait and switch and not "truly" unlimited - but pretty much this is true for any XaaS that advertises "unlimited" anything. That said though, I still find cloudflare's free basic product incredibly good for the price. The proxy will handle a pretty good amount of load before you get any sales emails. I use some of their enterprise products and I'm extremely pleased, so it is a little hard to complain when I am getting great value out of it. I am however always wary of this not remaining the case forever. For what it is though, I can't really find many comparable products. It's sort of like datadog to me - yes, it's expensive, yes, their pricing can be a bit nebulous and feels bad at times, but the product is still extremely good for what I need it to do and until that changes I guess I'll just keep forking over dollars. That seems to be the way of things now.

It's kind of the same reason Google does it. There's a saying about this that I do not recall how it is phrased but it's something to the effect of, if you're not paying for it you're the product.

You're the guinea pig to help them make the product better for paying clients and to help them market the product usefulness to those that pay.

There's a catch though, the peering in cloudflare free tier is horrendous in multiple countries, for example Germany, where t-mobile still insists on making cloudflare pay for peering, which they will only do for their premium customers, meaning free tier sites can barely load.

Slightly off topic, but also curious why Cloudflare doesn't put more effort into policing content of Pages, which are frequently used by bad actors. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflares-d...

Examples: https://pending-revew.pages.dev/ https://r2-cmq.pages.dev/ https://ampgoat-ligaciputra.pages.dev/

Because (IMO) it probably glows brighter than the sun.

Hey Matt! DB here from last summer haha!

cool to see you started writing! looking forward to seeing more, keep it up

Tin foil hat on?

I suspect they also benefit from the massive amounts of data gathering. A huge portion of the entire internet's traffic is going through Cloudflare, SSL-terminated. It's like being plugged into the server-side (unblockable) access log of every website. That would be worth a lot.

I also suspect their support of web attestation is not benevolent. With the level of control they already have, it's increasingly possible for them to flip a switch, with the full support of Apple and Google and Microsoft, so that only authorized devices have access to the web. curl on Linux? Not authorized. Outdated OS? It's up to Apple whether they feel like signing your request – can't expect them to support it forever! – but also you can't access that website without their approval.

I feel like a conspiracy theorist here but this stuff just seems way too close at hand.

In the blog post it says AWS offer a free tier of 100GB transfer on S3, but you can get 1TB when you serve it over CloudFront [1] which you normally do when using a custom domain with HTTPS

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/?nc1=h_ls

Cloudflare is truly awesome!

They offer incredibly generous infrastructure components for individuals and small businesses.

If you’re looking to host a podcast with a custom domain name and need significant free storage, you’ll quickly realize there aren’t many (if any) free options—until you discover Cloudflare. With tools like R2 and Pages, they open the door to a world of possibilities.

I’ve even built an open-source podcast CMS/hosting solution using Cloudflare [1]. Thanks to R2, you can host up to 10GB of audio for free! It’s a game-changer.

[1] microfeed.org

Thanks for invoking this wonderful discussion!

I run an open-source project[1] tracking the performance of pension fund schemes in India and offer a free API and a query builder because of Cloudflare.

I think this free tier, is sort of their customer acquisition strategy. I work as a freelance developer and because my experience with CF is good, I recommend CF to all my clients!

[1]: https://npsnav.in

As hardware gets cheaper, and economies of scale get bigger, it's way way cheaper to provide free stuff than spend on sales and marketing.

Works best at the extremes

I think providing unlimited bandwidth is a way to do marketing (i.e. letting people know that Cloudflare is a great, generous and high-tech company), and therefore they can attract more enterprise customers (Did you hear Cloudflare? Do you trust it? Of course!) - where the money is really from.

Cloudflare offers a lot for free. I think they are able to cover the free users from how much they charge enterprise customers.

> the page you're reading now is ~2.2MB, which is in line with typical page weights of ~2.7MB these days

For a small mostly-text blog post? Wtf are you talking about? That’s absurd.

Cloudflare requires a $3,000/year business plan in order to have custom name servers. Namecheap offers this for free.

"Account/Zone custom nameservers are available for zones on Business or Enterprise plans. Via API or on the dashboard."

Update: I say this to further illustrate how they operate.

I understand interconnecting Cloudflare’s network and hosting their servers by ISPs builds a beefier Internet and that’s great, but isn’t it potentially problematic for a small number of vendors to become a significant part of the network? What happens if they go out of business? Are we no worse off than before, or do we worry about equipment that’s in limbo unless purchased by another business? Or is it potentially bad but inevitable since investing in growing the Internet requires deep pockets so it will always be the bigger corporations owning large chunks of the network?

Infra like Internet cables under the ocean are to me more obvious things to be purchased by other businesses. ISP-collocated content servers that came to be due to discovered mutual benefits of content and service provider seem to me more complex in terms of managing them in the face of business changes.

have you looked at their enterprise prices? one enterprise account pays for thousands (or millions of low-traffic accounts) of free accounts

Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I’m wary of what might happen when they need to become profitable. Could this be another case of a company offering an excellent, cheap product while being propped up by investors, only to later have an “enshittification” [2] phase where they aggressively cut corners and increase prices to make a profit?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NET/financials/annual...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Other than bandwidth, is there any other performance differences between Cloudflare and GitHub Pages?

Probably not the place to post this feedback, but in general I get excited about what Cloudflare have been releasing in 2024. I'm borderline desperate to try them out in a business setting.

The only thing that really stops me is the horror stories I hear about random billing issues and on top of that account closures.

That is something I'm _never_ worried about with AWS.

On the off chance that someone from CF is reading this feedback.

Pages probably consumes less than 10% of resources compared to their free CDN. Probably even less than 1%.

Piggybacking on the thread a little, anyone has experience to share using Pages or Workers at scale? Perhaps I bought too much into the JAMstack hype, but it seems like a much more convenient approach compared to the k8s rube goldberg machines every other shop is utilizing (assuming they work and scale as advertised on the tin). Wondering what are some drawbacks or even show stoppers.

I've heard horror stories, where once you hit a certain limit they squeeze the hell out of you. And by that point in time you are locked in and forced to make a deal.

It's made me not use cloudflare for future products. Just charge me upfront what you need to make a healthy margin and let's do business!

Because it is a national security operation designed to spy on everyone

CF super fan since they released. Nice write up btw.

Why does any paid platform have a generous free tier?

Top of the funnel.

We are currently developing a project and were very open regarding the provider and none came close to Cloudflare pages.

The free geo information in the header alone is already worth it for us so we save money on purchasing a separate ip db but also don't waste time for the separate db call looking up the location.

I was very disappointed by their kv store latency and that d1 does not replicate yet. So we ended up comparing a poor man solution in just providing the json at a http endpoint on our webserver vs. quite a few global kv providers.

We set up a promise race and did thourough global tests. Doing the http request beat the global kv store providers by far, even if they have a pop in syd, the cloudflare http request to europe or the us was still faster. We are using Argo though, this might have helped as well.

This is great for the 100+ domains that I've registered but never had time yet to fully develop. Going to build landing pages for those domains.

It's always about creating technical debt at your org so that when they come to charge you 10-100X what some service is worth it's less painful to overpay them than it is to switch.

generous or not, Cloudflare's done enough that i'd never use them

here's a piece of life advice for you: if it don't make sense, theres a buck in it.

Without Cloudflare there would be many poor malware coders and phishers. Cloudflare are saints!

Everything has a limit.

you forgot to mention that Cloudflare is the by far the largest MITM operation on this planet

oh, btw, hello NSA o/

cloudflare is one of the most successful CIA spying op in history, following facebook. when people willingly disable their own encryption and allowing you to MITM them, money well spent i say.

I tried to build a static site using Cloudflare but it didn't build. I went back to Netlify.

I'm going to have to ask you to keep your voice down, sir.

HNer gets his casino site shut down and extorted into buying Enterprise for $120k/yr, there's an unwritten limit of 10TB. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808

I find myself often suspicious of "free" tiers, because it seems to be that 1. the terms can change at any time or 2. "free" can be removed at any time.

I had used CF Pages and I really really liked all the tools it gave me, but free didn't sit well with me. I switched to CDN bunny.net for hosting my personal site and DNS and I pay $1/mo, which is their monthly minimun payment. It doesn't have facny stuff like github intergation or such, but I feel more at peace actually knowing what I'm paying for.

I wish CF would have a personal pricing level, I'd be more than happy to pay them and have a customer relationship instead of a freemium user relationship with them!